


it's always summer under the sea

by Steerpike13713



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Angst, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Revenge, Self-Esteem Issues, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-28 04:11:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20419700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Steerpike13713/pseuds/Steerpike13713
Summary: In the Deep Roads, chasing a Paragon and a myth, Gwyneira Cousland dreams of Highever.





	it's always summer under the sea

She did not realise her own nakedness until she felt the sting of salt on her skin, opened her mouth to taste it, felt the chill north wind teasing at her hair. The deck rocked beneath her feet, the sky stretching out above and to every side, scattered with the stars her mother had taught her to sail by. There, there was the Maiden, and the White Wolf beside her. There was Toth and Satina, the Shadow and the Sun. The seabirds cried mournful overhead, the wind whistling through the rigging. The _Mistral_, she thought. She was home. She did not need to see the graceful lines of the sails, or the proud figurehead, carved in the likeness of one of the great dragons for which the ship was named, its wings spreading back to become the bows of the ship she had been born on. Fergus had been Cousland from the crown of his head to the tips of his toes, and he had been born in Highever, at their castle, but Gwyneira was more than half a Mac Eanraig, and she had come early, her mother had always told her, so that she might be born at sea.

A child’s laughter rang out over the deck. Oren, she thought. She was home. She had only dreamt the burning.

When she turned, though, there was no sign of him, nothing but the open door of the captain’s cabin, and the blackness beyond. The deck rolled and rocked beneath her feet as she crossed to the door, for all that the sea in every direction was calm and flat as glass, as a great mirror, the vault of the stars reflected so that it seemed they sailed on starlight. Something terrible was lurking below deck, she knew with the certainty of dreams. But Oren was down there too. A sword, she thought. If only I had a sword. No-one could hurt her, so long as she had her sword. No sooner had she thought it, than the sword was there, belted about her waist, and her shield with it, the laurels of Highever blazoned bright for all to see. Strange, that they made her feel no braver.

The first step felt as it should, wood worn smooth with the passage of many feet, so that she could almost feel every whorl through her bare feet. The second too, and the third- There had only been two steps down into the captain’s cabin. It was stone now beneath her feet, though it pitched and rolled just as the deck had done, and every breath she took was heavy with salt.

Her eyes were slow in adjusting to the dark, slower than they ought have been, but as the stone walls closed in around her, she knew them. The tunnel. She had seen it not half a dozen times in all her life, but she knew it, all the same. The earth was still beneath her feet now – she ought to have been stumbling, she had always taken longer to regain her land-legs than the reverse – and when she opened her mouth to drag in a desperate breath, there was no taste of salt on the air.

She could hear it again now, Oren’s voice up ahead, high and childish and chattering, but she could not see him. The dark swallowed every sign of him, left her alone here, in the dark, with the rock above her head.

“Oren?” she called into the darkness. “Oren?”

There was no reply but laughter, carried faintly on the indoor air, and she quickened her steps, but the tunnel stretched on ahead of her, close and dark and endless.

“Maker, let me see!” she hissed, and the sword in her hand sprang into blue-white light that illuminated nothing but her own hand, and the few scant inches of floor before her. She could feel the walls, pressing close on every side, but she could not see them.

This was her place, as much as the Mistral had been. The place of all Couslands, stretching back as far as Sarim, the captain of the guard, whose lord had bought and betrayed Flemeth of the Wilds, and died for those crimes. She should not need it here – not the light, and not the sword.

She could see another light up ahead, far distant, a faint golden glow around the edges of a door, _the_ door. Maker help her, she didn’t want to see what lay on the other side of that door. Something more terrible than the darkness, she knew that now. She tried to turn away- And as she raised her sword, its light fell upon the face of a genlock, spear in hand, behind her.

She tried to swing at it, but it was as if she fought underwater, her blade sweeping through the air so slowly it hardly seemed to move at all. The genlock suffered no such limitations. Its spear came up to parry her, and scored a line of fire down her naked shoulder. More darkspawn were stepping out of the darkness now, on every side, armed and armoured. A hurlock alpha pointed towards the faint light of the distant door with his cruel curved sword.

She laughed, more than half wild, and raised her sword again. “What? Have I not killed enough of you yet? Come on, then! I’ll take you one at a time or all at once!”

They did not move. Not hurlock or genlock or shriek. The hurlock alpha just kept pointing the way, as if it might stand there forever.

She lunged at it, and its armour parted like silk beneath her sword, the blade going through and through, but her sword was clean when she drew it out, and still the hurlock stood, its armour rent, its sword still pointing onward.

“Come on!” she snarled, “Try me!”

She tried to call upon the demon, the rage that had sent the darkspawn cowering away in waking life, but it was not there, and the points of the darkspawn spears jabbed at her again, a dozen points of white heat, the wetness of blood trickling from a dozen places as they urged her on. She swung her sword in a wide, humming arc, slashing wildly, but still they came, here an arm gone, here an eye, here five fingers, but still they stood, and still they advanced, so that she had no choice but move with them, inexorably, towards that terrible light.

Too soon, the door loomed up out of the dark. The darkspawn, she thought. I am letting the darkspawn in. She turned again to face them, her sword in hand, the light that ran along its length guttering.

“No,” she said, her voice shaking. “No.”

They laughed at her, teeth bared, foul twisted faces alight with gleeful cruelty, and she raised her sword again. She cut one down, and then another, and then another, and this time they did not rise again, but for every one of the spawn she killed, another took its place, faster and stronger and better-armed than the one before. It was not enough. She was tiring already, the shield strapped to her arm so heavy it might have been stone, not steel. And still, they kept coming, as fast as she could cut them down and then faster. A genlock, a hurlock, an alpha, a shriek, an emissary, one after the other until one twisted, howling face blurred into the next, and the tunnel was choked with bodies. But when she looked down, they were not darkspawn that lay piled at her feet like fallen leaves. There was Mother Mallol, and old Aldous beside her, who had done his best to hammer the rudiments of history and mathematics and lore through Gwyn’s head when all she’d wanted to learn was swordplay. There was Iona, who’d talked about her daughter with such a light in her face it was hard not to smile at it, and Lady Landra, who had taken all Gwyn’s attempt to scandalise her in stride. There was Nan, tiny in death, her rheumy eyes staring sightless up at Gwyn in mute accusation.

When she looked up, it was Ser Gilmore standing there, sword in hand. Already, his face was starting to blur in her mind’s eye, his face that she had sworn to herself she would never forget.

“…no,” she croaked. “Gil, _please_-”

He opened his mouth and howled, the high, piercing shriek of a sharlock, and took his blade, and ran her through.

She fell, but she did not fall far, and landed on hands and knees in shallow water, ankle-deep, and as she stood, she knew where she was. This was her bedroom, there was her bed, piled high with furs and blankets against the chill off the sea. There was the chest that held her armour, and she half-ran, half dragged herself to it, already fumbling for the latch. But no sooner had she opened the chest than she was dressed and armoured, plate and chain, the fine tourney-suit her father had made for her, the year she went to court. She had unhorsed Bann Alfstanna in this armour, Vaughan Kendells, Lord Oswyn, even the king, and crowned Anora with the champion’s laurels to the cheers of what had sounded like all of Denerim.

The light of her sword was reflected, shining silver-white, on the pitch-dark surface of the water. Already, it was starting to seep through her boots, knee-deep now and still rising, bitterly cold.

Oren, she thought. He will catch his death of this. She strained her ears, trying desperately to hear a peal of childish laughter in the next room, the sound of a boy’s high voice chattering in the hallway of the family quarters. But all was silent, but for the lapping of the water at her thighs. Already, she had to wade to the door, splashing softly with every step, all her layers of steel and wool and linen useless against the water that seeped in through every chink. It was to her hips now, and she nearly startled out of her skin at the first brush of something – some creature, some plant that had no business here, in Castle Cousland – against her leg beneath the water.

The door to her chambers had always stuck in the damp. It had saved her life, once, but now it slid open as easily as the unspooling of a skein of silk, letting in a tide of cold saltwater like a wave crashing in between two breakers to spill wide over a shore, sweeping her up with it and dashing her against the wall.

It ought to have broken her. It did not.

Even so, her head was ringing as she heaved herself choking to her feet. Her eyes stung with saltwater when she opened them, to find a world transformed. Hagfish and lampreys twined lazy circles around the four posts of her great bed, crabs skittering out from under the furs and making themselves at home there, and through the open door to the hallway, Gwyn could see a great basking shark gliding lazily by, its great maw gaping open in anticipation of fresh prey. Oriana would love that, she thought. Fine lady that she was, Oriana had grown up on the sea every bit as much as Gwyn had done, and she had craved nothing but shark-meat all the time she had been with child, driving Nan and the kitchen maids half to distraction.

Oriana…she would be nearby. Oren might have gone to her. She’d be in her chamber, the one she shared with Fergus, embroidering or reading or listening to the minstrel Fergus had retained for her amusement, the fire banked high against the chill of a Fereldan autumn. Gwyn wanted to see her, suddenly, though they had never been close. Gwyn had been too much younger, too wild and too disreputable to make the most natural companion for her sister-in-law, but even so, Oriana had never been anything but kind to her. Maybe it would have been different, if Oriana had been with her at court, but she hadn’t been. She’d only known Gwyn the child, and then Gwyn the disgrace, the embarrassment, the black sheep of the Cousland line. From sixteen through to twenty-four, they had hardly spent more than a few days at a time in one another’s company. But, when Gwyn had come home, travel-worn and tearful and in disgrace, Oriana had been kind to her, little as Gwyn had appreciated her kindness then.

There was blood in the water when she surfaced into the hallway, long crimson ribbons that twisted and held their shape for a few seconds before diffusing into a fine red mist. She tasted salt and copper as she dragged in another impossible breath, half-wondering that she could breathe at all, and then saw where the blood was coming from.

Fergus and Oriana’s room. Oren. _Oren_.

She tried to run, but the water was against her, every step costing more effort than the one before, the water seeming to suck her back, and now there were more sharks, circling, drawn in by the scent of blood on the water. Blighted, some of them – she could see the telltale spots of the darkspawn taint on their skin, spreading out from the gills over fins and across their pointed snouts. She tried to cry out, but no sound came, just a mouthful of blood and saltwater, which left her spluttering.

And then the door was before her. It opened at the first touch of her hand, swinging wide, and there, beyond it-

Oriana was already dead on the floor. That part, at least, had not changed. But Uncle Rendon – Arl Howe – was standing over her, one bony hand gripping the shoulder of a squirming Oren, whose eyes went wide when they fell on Gwyn.

His mouth soundlessly shaped a word – ‘Auntie’, perhaps? – that turned to bubbles as it left his lips, silenced before he could make a sound, and Howe’s knife moved at his throat. She was halfway across the room before the little body hit the ground – she had forgotten, somehow, how _small_ he had been – but that was too late for Oren.

Not for Howe.

He was unarmed but for an eating knife, dressed in the same velvet surcoat he had worn that night at dinner, when her father had toasted him and had Oriana, who could be trusted to be respectable, bring the high cup, so he could take the bread and wine that made him their guest in law. When he had called Gwyn the freshest flower of Highever, though she was past twenty and had never been accounted a great beauty even before her disgrace, and made insinuations about a match with his son Thomas, only eighteen and second in line to the Howe lands in Amaranthine, but already his father’s favourite over poor Nathaniel, sent away to the Free Marches years ago amidst whispers of his mother’s perfidy.

It felt as though it should have been harder to run him through and through, the sword scraping against his ribs as it went in. She looked into his pale, pointed face, only inches from hers now, as his eyes went wide and his face went slack in death. It should have been harder to bear his body to the floor and kneel beside it, hollow, staring down at the man Bryce Cousland had trusted, once, above all others.

“Gwyneira,” said her father’s voice, from nowhere, or from everywhere at once. “What have you done?”

“I had to,” she whispered, and tried to blink back tears, except that the sea had already carried them away. “He killed you.”

“You let him do it,” said another voice, equally beloved, equally familiar. She looked up, and she was in the great hall, with its high vaulted ceiling and the long table at the far end, where her father had feasted his vassals on high days. Where she and Anora had danced a carola together, that Wintersend that the court had spent at Highever, with all the ladies of the court. Her father was seated there, at the high table, with her mother at his right hand and Howe at his left, just as it had been that night. Blood was seeping slowly through the wool of Bryce Cousland’s surcoat, though she could not see from here the wound he had taken that night. Eleanor offered no such mercies. A dozen black-barbed arrows protruded from the purple velvet of her gown, and one more from the empty socket of one eye. The other eye was fixed on Gwyn, full of disappointment. “You left us to die while you fled.”

“I only did what you asked me to do!” she cried, desperate, but their disapproving eyes were on her.

“And what,” Arl Howe asked, leaning forward in his seat, “Tell me, Bryce, what has your daughter done with her salvation? Has she avenged you? Am I slain?”

“The Blight has to come first – Father, you made me swear to it-”

Bryce Cousland smiled sadly down at her. “Our family has always done its duty,” he said. “Is this yours, Pup?”

“Her duty is _here_,” Eleanor said, reproving, as if Gwyn had missed a step in her dancing lessons or come in sweaty and begrimed from the practice yard when guests were expected. “At Highever. Our people need their Teyrna, and where are you?”

“I never meant-”

“I know,” Eleanor sounded weary now, impossibly so. She always had, when Gwyn disappointed her. “You never mean to do wrong. And yet, wrong is always done. Can that be coincidence, Gwyneira?”

Gwyn’s throat was tight. “…I don’t know.”

“Don’t you?”

This time, the voice came from behind her, and when Gwyn turned, there was Fergus, standing in the centre of the great hall, armed and armoured as he had been when he rode away, that last afternoon when everything had still been _right_.

“I left my wife and child in your hands,” he said.

Gwyn squeezed her eyes shut. “I never thought he’d hurt them.”

The earth shook beneath her feet, the great hall and all within it reeling, drunken, pitching and rolling like the deck of the _Mistral_ in a storm. The ram, Gwyn thought. Maker help us, the ram has touched the gates-

And then there came a roar, high and piercing and unearthly, from somewhere far below her feet. No. Not the ram. Worse. So much worse.

The great dragon’s head broke through the flagstones, so vast it seemed to fill the whole world, its jaws a-gape and spewing blue-white fire that touched the walls of Castle Cousland and melted them, as if they were ice, not stone. It was a hideous thing, its pointed, ratlike face low to the ground like a hunting dog’s.

It swallowed Bryce first, then Eleanor, then Fergus, then Howe, and then Gwyn was alone before the Archdemon, her sword in hand.

_Our family always does its duty_, her father had said, nearly the last words she’d ever had of him.

Its great fanged jaws opened wide, wide, until it seemed it could have swallowed the whole world, and all at once, Gwyn began laughing even through her tears, high and wild and desperate, the demon rising in her once again.

“You want death?” she howled, more wolf than girl, “Come on then!”

The jaws closed even as she threw herself forward, and then-

The dark.

The dark.

The dark.

It was still dark when she opened her eyes, and lay staring up unseeing until her heartbeat slowed again. But then, it was always dark down here. Three weeks out from Orzammar, looking for a thaig that might not even still be standing, long since given over to the spiders and the deepstalkers and the dead. They had lit a fire when they made camp, but it was down to the embers now, only the faintest shadows of her companions visible through the gloom. Shale had taken the watch – not needing to sleep anyway, she claimed, made her the natural choice – and the crystals set into the golem’s stony hide shone with a faint, eerie light. Leliana was still asleep, or pretending to be – Gwyn hadn’t cried out in her sleep and woken her – but the dwarf they had picked up in Orzammar, Oghren, was sitting up by the embers of the dying fire, staring into the depths as if all the mysteries of the world were contained in them. He started at the sound of Gwyn’s footfalls, then grunted when he caught sight of her.

“Oh. Warden. Should’ve figured it’d be you.”

Gwyn made a vague, throaty noise, her mind only half on Oghren. Three weeks underground had done nothing for her social graces, and those had been limited enough beforehand. The shield was heavy on her back, her shoulders aching already. Just a few nights at an inn in Orzammar, and already her body was protesting at being forced back on the road again.

She laid her sword across her knees and felt in her pack for a whetstone, trying to keep her mind from lingering too long on the dream, the faint echo of disquiet still at the edges of her mind. It was hard going, especially when her fingers brushed the smooth stone of the toy bronto she had bought in Orzammar, in a moment of distraction, thinking it would make a fine gift for Oren when she returned home before it had all crashed in on her again. She had kept it anyway. She wasn’t quite sure why.

“How long before we reach Ortan Thaig?” she asked, not looking up from the blade. It didn’t need sharpened, in truth, hadn’t in as long as Gwyn had had the keeping of it, but that wasn’t why she did it.

Oghren grunted again. “A week, maybe two if something important’s caved in. Hard to say – you don’t get many patrols out this far. Legion of the Dead, maybe, but no-one from Orzammar.”

Gwyn nodded, and went back to her blade.

A month down here in the dark. Probably more, if they didn’t find Branka and her people at the thaig, and it had been long enough since the Paragon had left Orzammar that they could be anywhere in the Deep Roads by now, if Branka had even survived the journey. And, all the while, the Blight was raging on the surface, while she slogged through monster-infested tunnels in search of a legend, all to satisfy the futile bickering of a few score dwarven deshyr lords. She should be there, at Highever. Perhaps the Blight had not reached that far yet – she could only pray it hadn’t – but even if it had not…Rendon Howe was still alive out there, still free, and every time she heard him called ‘Teyrn’ in her father’s place, the knot of rage and grief and pain in her belly drew a little tighter.

What was she even _doing_ down here in the murk and the rot and the Taint? She ought to have been at sea, ought to have made for her grandfather’s keep on the Storm Coast, for her aunts and uncles and cousins and their raider fleet, and made Howe pay that way. Except- Except, if she’d done that, Alistair would have been the last of them, if he hadn’t died at the top of that tower. Except she’d made a promise, and the Couslands always did their duty. Except…except that she hadn’t thought what to do until it had been too late – she’d been numb all through until the Joining, until she’d seen Ser Jory dead on the ground and known that, for her, there would be no way out but through.

She could _feel_ Oghren’s eyes on her, and wished she couldn’t. The Warden’s uniform covered her from throat to fingertips, and was heavily armoured besides, but something about the way Oghren looked at a person would make anyone’s skin crawl.

“Here,” he said, and all at once a flask of something pungent and faintly spicy was thrust under Gwyn’s nose. “Not my own stuff, but it’ll get you good and plastered.”

She shouldn’t. She knew she shouldn’t. She was in command, and it wasn’t befitting, her mother had always said, for a captain to be drunker than her crew. They needed her at her best, down here on the darkspawn’s own territory, and beset with other dangers besides. Oghren’s stone-sense would help with the navigation, but Gwyn was flying blind, and that put this whole expedition far closer to the wind than she might have liked.

She took it anyway, one long deep draught of something that tasted like the scrapings of a dozen stable floors, fermented in an old boot with three-day-old fish heads and bones thrown in for flavour. It was vile, but it burned all the way down, and just then, that was what she needed.

Oghren laughed, all rasping edges, as she thrust the flask back at him, already wishing she could justify the loss of even a mouthful of their small store of fresh water to wash the taste out of her mouth.

“You’ve got a pair on you, Warden. I’ve known dwarves start singing ‘bout goblins after a couple sips of that.”

“I’m reliably informed I don’t,” Gwyn said, dry. It had been a source of some amusement at court, although the laughter had always died whenever Gwyn entered the room herself. Still, she’d heard all the jokes about Cousland and his flat-chested daughter, more than half a boy, and a few of the braying young noblemen who had hung about the court at Denerim like flies – Vaughan Kendells had been the worst of them, with his cronies Braden and Jonaley, but they hadn’t been the only ones – had talked, in their cups, of breaking into the Queen and her ladies’ apartments, to see if she really was a woman under her silken gowns, and not a boy masquerading to find his way into the Queen’s bed. She’d beaten Jonaley bloody on the tourney-field, the day after she’d overheard that particular titbit, more for the insult to Anora than to herself, but it hadn’t stopped the whispers.

“Will Branka do it?” she asked. “Vote our way?”

Oghren grunted. “Bhelen or Harrowmont…neither of ‘em’s what you’d call a Paragon. Not sure it matters. Don’t those fancy scrolls of yours force the King to help you, whoever he is?”

“That’s the way it’s supposed to work.” Not that that meant anything, when Loghain Mac Tir had left his king to the darkspawn, a teryn and his family were slaughtered in their own castle and not a voice was raised in protest, and King Maric’s son conspired to hand Ferelden back to the Orlesians with a marriage-pact on the eve of battle.

“Oh, aye? ‘Supposed’, is it? Well, king or no king, a Paragon should be enough to make the Assembly listen, so it’s Branka you’ve got to convince, not Bhelen or Harrowmont or the rest of the nug-humping deshyrs.”

It was a good thought. Politics…Gwyneira was not made for those. The disastrous end to her career at court had proven that. She was not made to be teyrna, either, but here she was. _Here_, she was, miles away and below her rightful place, her people bound in service to the very man who’d butchered their rulers and their fellows both, at Castle Cousland, for not even the lowliest kitchen maid had been spared in that blood-letting.

She didn’t want it, had never wanted it, but that made no matter. She had a duty.

“I can hear you brooding from all the way over here,” Oghren muttered. “It’s giving me toothache.”

“It’ll give others worse.”

She ought to have been there for her parents’ deaths. There ought to have been a deathbed, the chance to hear their last words and feel her mother’s hand go slack in hers as she let out her last breath. Not a panicked farewell in a poky larder, and a man in mail dragging Gwyn away as she begged to be allowed to embrace them, one last time. She ought never to have seen Oren die at all, and to have welcomed more nieces and nephews into the world with Fergus and Oriana, sailing in to make port at Highever every few months, laden with gifts and stories from her travels. There ought to have been a chance to forge some better bond with her sister-in-law, to see Fergus ascend to their father’s seat in his own good time. For all of these things and more, Howe would pay, and if he went to the Void before her…then Gwyn would pursue him even there, until she had exacted every drop of retribution they were due.

She could not be a fit daughter to her father, a fit lady to her queen, a fit teyrna to her people, but vengeance…that, Gwyn could do.


End file.
